Heard at SIFMA Ops 2025

Our CEO, Bob Santella, discusses the industry's collective responsibility to ensure seamless, resilient systems that safeguard mission-critical operations. His message underscores that resiliency—through robust infrastructure, transparent communication and trained teams—is the foundation for market stability and investor confidence.

Resiliency, what does it mean for our industry?

It means really, when you get down to it, the ability of our industry and all the participants to operate their businesses during market hours and after-market hours in a way that there's no disruption. What that means we understand that systems sometimes get broken down. There's mitigating factors that affect the processes and other things we need to deal with that cannot be apparent to the end user. It cannot be apparent and mission-critical processes during the day. Resilient systems, resilient processes, and resiliency in training of employees mitigate and often eliminate the risk you have when you deal with the market disruptions and so forth.

It's not just responsibility of one firm or one individual or one organization to deal with resiliency. It's important for the entire ecosystem, how we operate both in the US as well as globally, to ensure resilient systems. That means it's operable for everybody involved every day and every minute the market is open.

What it means as far as the industry, the member firms, and all those that participate in the marketplace, there's an unbreakable and a collective responsibility to ensure that all systems that are required for mission-critical functions and responsibilities are resilient. That means they're seamless, 100% uptime, and there's proper communication and transparency to the end user, to customers, to regulators, and industry organizations that work with market participants to ensure that stability. Ultimately, as leaders in the marketplace, no matter who we serve, we're serving customers that want stability, and they want to make sure they have certainty in the marketplace. Resiliency ensures that certainty and ensures that clarity that gives people the level of comfort to invest in markets and deal with financial firms.